


Cold Hearts and Lonely Nights

by Acai



Series: Empty Cities and Hopeless Searching [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Oneshot, Sadstuck, au where after the game ends the world resets and john is alone, happy ending kind of, homestuck oneshot, no one can find eachother, so very alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 06:04:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4614012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone says that it was just a coma, that it was all made up. You knew better, you knew that it had to be real. You know that everyone in that game was real, and when you said "let's go home," this isn't what you meant. This isn't home. This is lonely, sad, and frankly a little scary. There's no one here that you know, there's no Pesterchum and therefore no way to even see if they're all really out there. Sburb never existed, and everyone says they were all just figments of your subconscious. </p><p>You won't listen.</p><p>You know better. </p><p>or</p><p>the AU where after Sburb ended and they all went home it wasn't really home, but a new reset Earth that the game created.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Hearts and Lonely Nights

**Author's Note:**

> Just an AU I wrote real fast. There's going to be a sequel up within two days, so stay tuned and subscribe!

You didn’t believe them. You knew that it couldn’t be possible. One year, they told you. Just one year. It wasn’t though, it was so many years. There was no car accident, there was a game. There was no Skype, there was Pesterchum. You didn’t know anyone called Abby or Luke, like the kids in your contacts, you knew Dave and Jade and Rose. It wasn’t one year in a coma, it was such a long time in a game. You knew they had to be kidding when they told you, they said that it was normal for your brain to construct another universe. That was normal, they said. You’re lying, you’d said back, fighting back tears. The newspapers all read the date of a year after your birthday, there were no craters from meteors, and there was no way of contacting any of your Pesterchum contacts. There was no way to check. You just had to believe them that it was all a lie, you had to go along in a numb haze. You had to go to school and learn about things that you didn’t care about, the whole time thinking about a world above the clouds and billowing capes and grief and guilt and loss and pain and friendship and more-than-friendships and imps and trolls and magic—You had to think of everything that never existed.  
Somehow that hurt more than the deaths themselves.  
Every night you went to bed practically pleading to wake up on Prospit. When you woke up in the morning without even a glimpse of Skaia you’re always so wound up that you don’t feel the effort to talk that day, sitting in silence and learning about algebra instead of learning about ways to control wind or beat the game.  
The game, Sburb. You googled it when you woke up. There wasn’t a single result, it never existed, it was never going to. Pesterchum didn’t have any results either. There was forty two people in the U.S named Dave Strider, and thirty one named Rose Lalonde. Jade Harley came up with a thousand hits, all for an eighty year old author. None for a girl on an island with green eyes and black hair. You even hopelessly attempt to find anything on Alternia, or trolls. Just a town in Italy and cave beasts. They never existed. Every time you go outside you stare pitifully out the window for a girl with bleach-white hair or a boy with shades, and while you find several it’s never them.  
It’s painful, not being able to let it go. You find that you can’t, though. You feel like those years happened, they had to have happened. When you had gripped your friends hands you had felt the warm flesh and you’d heard their nervous breathing, ragged but anticipating, you’d seen the same look in their eyes and you’d grinned at them one last time.  
“Let’s go home,” you’d said.  
But oh you think maybe you would have rather stayed there, in the game and with them, rather than here where everything felt fake and strange. It was different than before the game. Like the whole world shifted after the game and you were thrown back in, alone.  
You like to try and convince yourself that it’s just one more challenge. Or that the world just rebuilt itself after the game. So maybe Rose, Dave and Jade aren’t well-known, that makes sense. They’re out there, somewhere, you tell yourself. They’re just as confused and scared, they’re googling all of this, too. They’re looking, they’re just as lost as you. Dave is in Texas and Rose is wherever she was from, and you’re here. The trolls, they’re in Alternia. Who knows if they have ways of finding each other? Maybe they all still have their Trollian, who knows if they have other chat systems? Maybe they’re all up there having a big, trollish party. Or maybe they were right and you’re just crazy. Maybe they were right and none of that ever happened, there was no Rose Lalonde who was crazy good at diagnosing people or figuring out complicated things, who was the first human to date a troll. Maybe there was no Dave Strider who could jump around in time and had impossibly red eyes, who pretended to be a cool kid but really was pretty cool in a different way deep down where he liked to hide it. Maybe Jade Harley was all a figment of your imagination, maybe there was never anyone who spent three years on a spaceship with you. Perhaps there was no doggy girl, maybe no one ever played Ghostbusters with you on your birthday, and maybe that birthday never even happened. Maybe there is no girl out there on her own little lonely island, so far away. Maybe there is no Alternia, maybe there’s not twelve trolls out there on that planet so, so far away. Maybe there was never any irritated, gray-skinned troll called Karkat Vantas with mutant red blood, maybe there was never any blind troll with teal blood or any snappy girl raised by an arachnid who you thought you had a crush on. Maybe they never had ancestors, maybe there wasn’t a game, maybe there wasn’t a session. Maybe there wasn’t a red team and a blue team. Maybe you really were in a big car crash, maybe you were in a coma for a year.  
You’d never have a way of knowing, either way.  
Your dad still was the same. You still lived in the same house, with the same room. You had a feeling that the walls weren’t covered in scribbles you couldn’t see, though. You stared at the posters, but you didn’t get the same sense of joy from seeing them. Your computer just made you feel flat-out upset and you checked it hourly, religiously. You never saw a flashing icon, though. Never saw turntechGodhead messaging you with an update on the bonfire he made on the roof with his brothers puppets. Never had tentacleTherapist message you, never got to tease her about fanfiction she wrote. It felt like such a dumb thing to miss, now. You did miss it, though. You missed it like hell, even if it never even existed. And if it didn’t, you desperately wanted it to. It’s what felt like the real world to you, this wasn’t. The real world was the one where you played a dumb game with your friends, the real world where you ectobiologically created you and your friends, and your kid parents.  
You were still constantly surrounded by cakes, by Better Crocker and those ridiculous clowns. Your dad was the same person, if not slightly kinder to you. You still didn’t utter a word to him, but you knew that he wished you would, that he missed you that whole year that you were gone.  
You felt guilty, then, that you were wishing to be back in a world where he died. It was horrible of you, and you, in that world, had desperately wanted him to not be dead then as well. You hated to admit that you would go back to that world, though. You knew that he would want you to, too. 

The boring thing about life is that no matter how much everything feels fake and as confused and upset as you were, you still had to go about doing what everyone told you to do. You did your homework, you wrote your essays. You did everything they told you for seven months, until you almost did believe that this was the real world, you believed the whole coma shtick. You really did, you believed it so much that you felt Alternia and Skaia and Prospit slipping from your mind most of the day. The piercing feeling had faded to a dull throb and you went about your life as expected every day. You went to the library to type essays, since your dad was ancient and didn’t have a printer. You forced the game to leave your mind; you pretended that this was all real. Because it was.  
That’s what you still told yourself every single morning. There was a coma, not a game.  
That’s not what you were telling yourself now, though. Right now you were telling yourself that the girl in the bus looked damn well like Jade Harley. She has messy and unruly hair; she wore a green and black dress. She had a rather large dog on a leash next to her, her fingers covered in little strings.  
It wasn’t Jade, obviously, because Jade was never really a person at all, they said. But it sure looked like her.  
So you stood there as the bus sat at a stop. You watched the girl bob her head slightly to the music; you stood, staring as she slowly turned to look at you. You watched as her bright jade green eyes made contact with your own and as the bus moved forewords once more and moved on. 

And as you told yourself that you would find her again.

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me what you thought! Leave a comment and a kudos if you liked it, and if you found any errors please leave those in the comments as well for me to fix. Thanks for reading, and for the constant support! ^.^


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